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Excuse me: you mean Captain Tom Moore who is now promoted to the rank of Honorary Colonel and is a knight of the realm.
He raised 33 millions for the NHS staff welfare fund. Here the BBC explains how the money is spent.Steph, you very much seem in favour of permitting SARS-CoV-2 infection to spread without social restrictions, so I have some questions for you.
Do you think people should die of covid-19 in their homes without medical care? And who should allocate what medical facilities there are, and on what basis? If large numbers of people struggling for breath turned up at hospitals, or were brought by their families, what should be done with them? And if this policy of no restrictions and letting hospitals be overwhelmed doubled or quadrupled the death rate, would you consider that acceptable, and preferable to restrictions?
Please remember that these are other people’s deaths and final days you’re considering, not just your own.
Clark
I don’t want to speak for Steph but I think Steph, unlike others who post here, asked some genuine questions because she found statements by someone like Yeadon plausible because he is a Scientist. I think some of the questions asked are legitimate. Is the cost of lockdown for what is perceived to be a disease that causes death mostly to those who are probably at the end of their life worth the economic hardship for all of society as lockdown will also have an effect on death rate due to other causes?
There are different aspects to this question. Scientifically and medically it is obvious that the argument is clearly that the measures are in favour of extreme measures to suppress the virus because mortality is not the only factor, you have to take into account the contagiousness and the morbidity and the sequelae of the disease and their secondary effects which also will cause societal and economic disruption.
But there are also other aspects of this pandemic, a sociological, ethical and political aspects and that is why there is so much wide interest in the science by people who would normally not worry about questioning the science.
The problem here is that what people like Boris Johnson and others call ‘the science’ is selected and presented through a politically modified prism (including the selection and makeup and political interference within SAGE) The gross mishandling of the crisis, the lack of strategy and the sleaze accompanying the awarding of contracts to cronies have further amplified the suspicion. Some also see that the measures have failed to prevent a second wave but that is because of the poor application of the measures. Go around the country now, it is not a country in lockdown.
The lockdown should have been a one bite at the cherry attempt. Should have been done properly, a la China (minus some of the worst coercive measures, more like NZ or South Korea). Not that I think lifting the lockdown now will help the economy but I think it is too late for it to have the impact needed.
The lesson here is, when you go to vote, look at the heart of what the system stands for. Many people voted for very narrow reasons and forgetting the nature of whom they voted for. Whereas everyone wants apparently want to improve their lot and that of others, in fact people voted for incompetence and sleaze. Johnson had a good track record in both but seems to have got away with it with the help of the very press that is now trying to convince everyone of their impartiality.Clark – You make the assumption that I am in favour of ‘permitting SARS-CoV-2 infection to spread without social restrictions’ I am not even convinced of that myself, so I think you are stretching it a bit to assign such a position to me. Were you to contend that I seem to have ‘deep reservations about social restrictions’ I would willingly agree, for the reasons I have already set out. You then ask me to answer a series of ‘what if’ questions. And herein lies the difficulty, as we are all dealing with ‘what ifs’ to some extent. I could just as easily ask you ‘what if’ social restrictions result in any number of evils, from extreme and widespread poverty, huge increases in death rates and the destruction of human rights. These are at least fairly well documented as they have happened before. You will no doubt say ‘the science’ proves beyond doubt that terrible things will happen if strict controls are not enforced, but science is still only a series of ‘what ifs’, it is not infallible, it changes over time and is often subsequently proved incorrect. And it hasn’t even begun to look at some of the possible unforeseen effects, such as significant interference with the ‘normal’ circulation of viruses, essential to our survival.
I do consider other people’s deaths and final days, although I am honest enough to say that I think of them in terms of those I know personally and not in terms of a vague mass of souls whom I have never met. The final weeks of my next-door neighbour, who had been long ill and suffered with Alzheimer’s, were quite tragically marred when his little trips out to the garden centre and visits from his children and grandchildren were suddenly stopped by the first lockdown, leaving him wildly unhappy and confused. His health spiralled rapidly downwards and he died shortly after the lockdown was lifted. His wife is left not only with the sadness of bereavement but a desperate feeling of letting him down, despite it being quite beyond her control. His final days were not improved in the slightest by the measures supposedly in place to protect him. If I was as rude as you, I might ask accusingly ‘don’t you care about him or her?’ but it serves no purpose, it is not your fault.
You seem very concerned by a vision of huge numbers of people gasping for breath and bodies piled up. I personally do not share that vision, my fears lie elsewhere, for the future of my children and grandchild and for others that I know who are being badly knocked about in all this. But neither of us can accurately predict the future and nor can the scientists. Look more kindly on your fellow man, even if he doesn’t agree with you, it’s all you can really do to make the world a better place.
SA – Thank you for making some very important points, although I did not find Yeadon plausible because he was a scientist. Had he been a milkman I would still have found what he has to say of interest! It is a very very complex situation and not at all as clear cut as I think Clarke feels. I agree entirely that there is something disturbingly wrong with the way we all keep voting for ineffectual and power-hungry governments. To be fair, we don’t have much choice. I suppose every system is inherently flawed, as soon as someone stands up and says ‘Vote for ME’ we know that is not really the kind of individual we need. The only exception I can think of is Corbyn, but without the killer instinct he was lost. An unsolvable contradiction it seems.Steph, please quote my “rudeness” in the comment you’re replying to.
I am quite fed up with the complements and insinuations, which you apply very selectively. If your personal account earlier is genuine, you should know better than to deploy such techniques of propaganda.
– “You seem very concerned by a vision of huge numbers of people gasping for breath and bodies piled up. I personally do not share that vision”
It is not a vision as you again insinuate, you need only look at Bergamo in Italy, or the first waves in Spain and New York, or the outbreak aboard Diamond Princess. It is not a matter requiring scientific interpretation that you may raise seemingly reasonable doubt about (as the corporate media is so adept at); it is simply experience so far.
And please explicitly retract your accusations and insinuations that I don’t care about human rights or children.
“Rudeness” indeed. There are ways to insult and smear people without vulgarity, and I’m discovering that you are expert in them.
Look! In many buildings fire broke out, in various cities across the world. In cities with neoliberal mayors the fire brigade were ordered to wait an hour, because if the fires went out on their own council money would be saved. These burned to the ground, whereas elsewhere prompt action saved the buildings.
But combustion is a complex scientific matter, and there is no certainty that the pattern will be repeated. We can find a few people, whose scientific qualifications we always quote at length, who tell us that the ruined buildings were exceptional. Speeding fire engines are a danger to the public.
All these experts are warm and nice; very commendable people. Those fearful souls who advocate action are rude, and don’t care about children or human rights!
Pah!
Clark
I find myself here as a self appointed adjudicator. No doubt both you and/or Steph will tell me to pxxx off, and I will accept that. I feel you are both concerned and honest and seek the truth but with different perspectives. I think we should all take less offense if our views are challenged and take it in our stride. Please don’t take offence.Clark – You previously accused me of ‘walking away’ from a discussion. I have attempted not to do that. However I am now holding up my arms, waving a white flag and surrendering. I find you utterly impossible to debate sensibly with.
Steph
Sorry to see you go. Please take care. I know it is not the right season at the moment for gardening, but maybe it is for garden design? Anyway my cyclamen is my joy in the garden at present and are so nice over this relatively colourless period until early spring, where one species or other will be in flower.
Take care and all the best.SA – Thank you! It is most certainly a good time to be gardening, as well as designing. In fact there is never really a time when it is not good to garden, it keeps you sane. Cyclamen are cheery little plants aren’t they. There is one, Cyclamen purpurescens, which flowers a little earlier, in late summer, which has the most beautiful scent.
Enough wasting of Craig’s space I think, all the very best to you too.“(S)cientists warned that every day of festive respite would require five days of restrictions.” (Guardian.) I’m sure they worked that out oh-so scientifically and expertly.
Hell, the rulers are nudging Passive Gratefulness like nobody’s business!
This is likely to be an “NHS” Christmas.
Why not get little signs saying “NHS” and hang them on your Christmas tree? Or maybe make a placard saying “NHS” for the angel at the top to hold?What if the “new normal” is psycho?
Today so far, 1905 deaths with Covid (I’m not sure of the exact criterion) have been reported in the US. That will be the highest daily reported figure since May.
*Hoard food*.
Steph, thank you for persevering with discussion, as I requested. I regard “hit and run” commenting (for want of a less critical term) as detrimental to understanding; it creates merely an impression, which many people simply empathise with or react against, according to how they feel. Decent people’s feelings are generally good guides for their interpersonal behaviour, but unsuitable for assessing matters of fact, so I prefer, and recommend, assessing practical situations thoroughly by use of evidence, reason and rationality, such that we distil the best understanding we can of our actual situation, before using our emotional judgement to decide our course of action.
What I have to say next is critical of your approach to the predicament of the pandemic; I hope that this does not upset you too much. I contend that I am not “impossible to debate with”, but rather that there are parts of “the debate” – or more correctly, humanity’s actual predicament – that you have so far found too distressing to consider. I am not a doctor nor a hospital administrator, nor anyone else whose job it is to allocate finite resources in this crisis, but by accepting the facts of events so far I have come to understand what heart-wrenching decisions people in these positions are having to make. The faster SARS-CoV-2 is permitted to spread, the more sick people these decision-makers will have to abandon, casting them aside to spend their last days in a doomed, futile and increasingly desperate struggle for breath. This is not some nightmare conjured from my sadistic soul; if only it were so insubstantial! It is the unpleasant reality of how covid-19 kills; ask Dredd, who used to comment as Dr Edd, a doctor who has been treating covid-19 patients.
This is why I asked you the questions above. You didn’t attempt to answer any of them. Instead, you retreated to the domain of opinion, where our equality to the right of self-expression is widely but misleadingly believed to make wrong as good as right. To claim that the suffering I describe above won’t happen here is tantamount to claiming that it hasn’t happened already elsewhere. It is wishful thinking; it is to permit what we wish to override what we know. But to make ethical decisions, our emotional judgement must be based on reality rather than what we wish to be true. That is the meaning of being adult, and why we’d be wrong to foist such decisions onto children.
– – – – – – – –Thank you for your personal account of your circumstances. I wrote you a long reply shortly after, but due to a technical problem it was lost upon posting, which greatly disheartened me at the time. I strongly approve of describing personal context around our political opinions; improving as many’s personal circumstances as much as possible should be the highest purpose of politics. I wish you the best for your treatment. I also hope, when your time comes, that the medics can ease your passage from this world as much as possible. I hope for you, as for everyone, that the facilities to do so are not overwhelmed by ill-informed choices made by the “government”. But sorry to say, it’s looking no better for that than it is for the climate and ecological emergency. Ultimately, our imagination, such a joy to us when we played make-believe as children and so vital to our creativity, is something that we need to learn to recognise and hold in context; while continuing to cherish it, we must vigilantly guard against lapses into self-deception. This difficult task calls for life-long self discipline.
– “Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.”
M Scott Peck, psychiatrist; The Road Less Travelled, 1978.
N_ – “I’m sure they worked that out oh-so scientifically and expertly.”
Well it’s not exactly difficult, is it? Just compare the gradient of the graph when it’s rising with the gradient when it’s falling. It’s the Grauniard’s fault, printing that absurd “scientists say” (as they always do) rather than pointing out the bleedin’ obvious!
Steph, if we weren’t continually returning to discussions about “lockdown”, we could have progressed to much more interesting and important matters, such as, what will the course of covid-19 really turn out like, and what can we do to regain democracy?
But the agendas are set by the corporate media, and they are its own, so we’re forever “debating” irrelevancies such as the opinions of Ioannidis and Yeadon. I’m frustrated because I’m up against a force many orders of magnitude more powerful than myself, and I’m frustrated with you because you unwittingly permit yourself to be a channel for it – yet another channel, of the millions that it cultivates. It makes so much noise that it isn’t even possible to achieve an atmosphere conductive to reasonable discussion. It propagates hideous sound-bites like “the new normal”, as if we’re going to have masks and social restrictions forever from now on – which ignores every realistic scenario by which covid-19 could develop.
Please. Pointing out that covid-19 could overwhelm the hospitals and cause hundreds of thousands of deaths in a couple of months is not fear-mongering, nor a reflection of my fears. It is merely the most likely extrapolation of what we’ve seen so far. And if Yeadon says otherwise, ask yourself; is it likely that he’s doing so on Delingpole’s blog rather than in Nature because Nature is part of a global scientific conspiracy to rob the poor? Or is it because he’s talking crap?
We mustn’t mix up what we’ve got with what we want, and we certainly mustn’t pretend that covid-19 is less serious than it is just because we don’t like what the “government” is doing.
Clarke – Thank you. It must be a wonderful thing to be so completely assured of one’s own rightness that, having been granted total submission from one’s opponent, one feels obliged to painstakingly patronise them as well.
@Clark – I don’t like “arguments” that depend solely on shouting loaded phrases either. But let’s unpack that very carefully so as not to fall into the trap of doing the same thing. In a nutshell, what happens is that assumptions are slipped through as hidden premises. The classic example is the question “When did you stop beating your wife?” This is the standard methodology of the moron who hasn’t thought about a topic very deeply at all (or about anything), but who can’t admit it to himself and who likes to address those who have thought about it more deeply than he has, or indeed who may have only thought about it equally or comparably deeply, or who are simply asking intelligent questions so as to improve their understanding, as themselves being morons. Morons do even this without thinking about it! Nobody ever advances their understanding by habitually behaving like that. All they do is stay sunk in the mud. You can can think of it as “character armour” or whatever. You get it all over the internet. It’s a major disease of our time. It’s like a plague. It’s particularly bad in Britain, where sarcasm is its usual vehicle and where the dominant culture is one of caste-upholding putdowns. Britain is absolutely chockful of the browbeaten. (Just look at how people in Britain look up to medics, whom they call “doctors”. It’s not like that in Russia.) If I had a pound for every time I’ve been patronised by a stupid ignorant moron in Britain I’d be very rich. Morons hate it that someone who isn’t from the elite thinks for themselves. They think the person wants to be “Mr Posh”. The person irritates something inside of them – namely their unverbalised knowledge that they have actually chosen to be morons and keep on choosing to stay being morons.
You do battle in passing (and it’s important that it’s in passing) against the notion that you describe as the idea that “Nature [the journal] is part of a global scientific conspiracy to rob the poor”. I suggest without any sarcasm or intent to be patronising that you cogitate some more about the nature of social exploitation, the use of the concept of “science”, and the function of the hierarchy of academic journals.
I note that you refer to the “corporate media” but not “corporate science”. Seriously if you can criticise the way the media works you ought to be able to criticise the way scientific “opinion” works, and the system in which decisions are made regarding what actually gets researched by “scientists” and what doesn’t. (We can agree that those decisions affect scientific opinion, right?) It’s all about money and power and jobsworthery and it’s highly centralised.
An awful lot is slipped through with the use of words such as “science”, “scientist” and “expert”. I see their usage as akin to the use of words such as “Aryanology” in Nazi Germany. They mostly mean “shut the f*** up and salute the flag”.
We really are living under fascism, and it really is only in a very early stage. That’s not exaggeration. In Britain within the space of 8 months it has already slaughtered, what, a few tens of thousands in old people’s homes, in which the residents are (or were) among the most isolated people in a culture that has an awful lot of isolation. The notion of “be grateful to your betters” has spread from health treatment to Christmas. Soon it will spread to food.
Economic production practically stopped for a few months, it is about to stop again, and meanwhile the government has announced its plan to increase military spending dramatically.
“The new normal” is a great phrase to use. Anybody who doesn’t realise that the rulers really are turning the ratchet and that they do NOT intend to reach a point where they remove all the anti-socialisation restrictions but on the contrary they plan to INCREASE them, and not gradually but in sudden jumps, must be some kind of Pollyanna whose address is “Cloud Cuckoo Land”.f
Resisting the planned mega-cull is impossible unless one gets a handle on what it will be all about. I use the future tense, because we “ain’t seen nothing yet”. As they ask on the Cryzine website, “When the “helpy gas” vans roll into the “social housing” estates, what identification letters will they carry on their sides?” (Answer: “NHS”.) That’s an excellent way of putting it because it can make hearers’ blood run cold, which for some may be exactly what’s needed to jolt them onto the road of wising themselves up.
Steph, I am not “completely assured of [my] own rightness”; I just look at the graphs and the timing of social restrictions. What they indicate is obvious, and entirely in accordance with common sense – social restrictions slow the spread of infection. This has been known for centuries eg. leper colonies, and it’s part of common etiquette, “keep your distance / don’t visit me this week; you don’t want to catch my cold”.
But as soon as it got serious enough to affect the economy, suddenly it was up for “debate”, and our “news” media rapidly became saturated by the tiny minority of “experts” who claim that social restrictions are inappropriate. The fact that the media makes money from advertising whereas sales fall during social restrictions is just a coincidence, of course. Where have I seen such cherry-picking before? Oh yes; three decades of global warming denial, eventually conceded when the North Pole had nearly melted, the advance warning from science squandered. The next chapter has already begun; “human activity isn’t really starting Earth’s sixth mass extinction event; hear our fearless right-wing journalists interview a handful of people with all these following letters after their names explaining why the obvious signs, painstakingly quantified by thousands of field scientist and reviewed and summarised by the IPBES, is actually a conspiracy by the UN to incite public fear and justify yet more taxes on you, our unfairly exploited audience whose opinions ought to count”.
If you hadn’t been fighting Steph you wouldn’t have felt the need to “submit”. I’m just the messenger; the mortality graphs speak for themselves. I won’t apologise for your feelings of being patronised because I didn’t intend to do so, but I’ll apologise for not apologising if you like, since not apologising is at least my own decision rather than your interpretation.
Yours, torture apologist and child exploiter Clark 🙂
N_, I’ll answer later; right now I need some fresh air and I’d like to catch the last of today’s sunshine.
N_
“I note that you refer to the “corporate media” but not “corporate science”. Seriously if you can criticise the way the media works you ought to be able to criticise the way scientific “opinion” works, and the system in which decisions are made regarding what actually gets researched by “scientists” and what doesn’t. (We can agree that those decisions affect scientific opinion, right?) It’s all about money and power and jobsworthery and it’s highly centralised.”
There is no such thing as corporate science. You made that up. Corporate media is very clearly defined and owned and funded by rich men and corporations. In the case of scientific research there is no such centralised funding and control. You are right in one respect, before Thatcher and Blair, science was funded to a certain degree by government funding based purely on the scientific merit of the proposed research, its utility in advancing knowledge and also eventually to be translated to practical uses such as new treatments, drugs vaccines an so on. This meant that there was a good chance of getting funding for basic research, asking questions or defining parameters which advanced our knowledge but may not have a direct commercial or monetary value. After Thatcher and Blair’s ‘reforms’ government funding for research was considerably reduced and many researchers were encourage to seek industrial sources for funding to targeted ‘translational research’. This gave priority to research that could lead to results with a commercial value that could be exploited later.
But none of these have led to ‘centralisation’ of the research itself or direct control on how the research was done or the results or of the workforce. Of course a lot of commercially funded research but not all, had clauses controlling publication and confidentiality, but a sizeable amount remains whereby the researchers have free reign to explore other subjects.
Science, like anything is as reliable as its practitioners and the various professional checks on its operation. Many of the scientific and medical journals have established a long tradition and reputation of impartiality and interpreting the science according to the methodology and the derived data. This system generally works but occasionally there are corrupt scientists that sneak falsified data, or dubious methodology past a journal which is later refuted or retracted. There is no overarching corporate control of this process and it works well. And why does it work well? Because falsified or unreproducible results in science usually die a natural death, advances that are genuine and useful are taken up and lead to more advances. It is almost a self selecting process.
But to lump science as one monolith and equate it to corporate media is an oversimplification. Having spent a lot of time describing and decrying the methods of the ‘morons’ you should have been more careful not to make the same errors that they do.
N_, yes, capitalism distorts science; one interesting book about its methods is Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre. Capitalism inevitably distorts everything, and in that sense Nature indeed plays a part in robbing the poor.
But systems vary in their robustness and vulnerability to capitalist pressures, and science is far more robust than the corporate media or, say, government foreign policy based on briefings by spooks. Ultimately, science has to continually refine its reflection of facts, so it is anchored in reality, which transcends and is greater than capitalism or even humanity. It is less vulnerable for a similar reason; its value to commercialism is dependent upon it correctly representing reality, so too much corruption would destroy its utility. There are also significant parts of science still within the diminishing public sector.
My comment wasn’t meant to imply unqualified praise for the journal Nature, it was a specific comparison between the scientific literature and the personal blogs of journalists for the right-wing press. And Yeadon also seems to be more businessman than scientist.
I don’t believe there’s a secret plot for a cull. Firstly, our old folk are a massive cash cow that moves public and working-class money to the big medical corporations and private care companies, propelled up by the guilt felt by their offspring, deprived of time and energy by neoliberal employment conditions. Secondly the older population are an important element of the Right’s voter base. Thirdly these bozos couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery and can’t even keep their corrupt deals secret.
Is Cryzine your blog? I read some bits; I too find it heartbreaking that so many of the population have been so desensitised and – I’m lacking a word – many people have stopped looking in depth, their curiosity seems to have been leached out of them, they resort to slogans and blame. Variations in intelligence shouldn’t be a problem; people vary in every aspect, diversity is nature’s method of building collective resilience, and some less-bright people nonetheless have good hearts. But appealing yet divisive and self-absolving memes flood from the corporate media like sweeties stacked near the supermarket checkout positioned to exploit immature and under-exercised minds – the result is depressingly ugly.
Capitalism is a system, not a conspiracy – at least, not a formal one. Capitalism includes conspiracies, and acts as an incentive to conspire, but even those at the pinnacles of the pyramids it creates are trapped and manipulated by the system; many live in constant fear among elaborate alarm systems and security guards, while “lesser” folk may still leave their homes unlocked, thereby helping to nurture community.
Hey N_, I just followed your @Clark link, and found that I have a profile on these forums! I suppose it must have been automatically generated from my old moderator’s credentials. The e-mail address must be out of date because my Gravatar doesn’t appear, and it has a link to my old Plusnet webspace, which Plusnet took down after Craig linked to my copy of The Catholic Orangemen of Togo causing the outgoing data limit to be exceeded.
It’s a funny old site, this; it has things forgotten in disused corners.
More bad news from the US: 1965 deaths with Covid have been reported already for today, with about 1-2 hours left. (Reporting slows down during those hours, so hopefully today’s figure won’t climb much higher.) Yesterday there were 1971. The last time before yesterday when there was a daily figure above 1920 was six and a half months ago on 7 May, during the decline of the first wave. The current daily figures in the ongoing third wave (Oct-?) are higher than any daily figures during the second wave (Jul-Sep), and about 35% higher than figures for corresponding days last week. And temperatures are getting colder. The graph may be about to go convex. For what it’s worth, the highest daily figure during the first wave was 2744, or only about 40% higher than today’s figure so far.
From Wales Online: “Christmas Day rules could include a ban on arguing or hugging“.
Is talking OK? What about looking at somebody and recognising that they are actually there?
I bet picking a phone will remain lawful for the foreseeable future! (Or at least so long as there’s an electricity supply to recharge its battery with.)
The gob that the idea of banning arguing at Christmas came out of belongs to David Spiegelhalter, the “University of Cambridge professor”, “statistician”, “chairman of the Winton Centre for risk and evidence communication” (a David Harding-funded outfit housed by Cambridge University’s pure maths department), and royal-decorated knight of the realm. In other words he is a propagandist for big business and its state.
In his sneering view of what working class families do at Christmas, combined with is fanatical commitment to changing their behaviour by showing them who is boss, he reminds me of Eyal Winter, who said a few months ago that for pubs to reopen drinkers could be rationed to two or three pints of beer before being politely asked to go home.
This is close to what some call “gaslighting”, and it’s deliberate.
When TB was rampant, the authorities didn’t tell people “Don’t spit more than twice in a row”. Nor during WW2 did they say “Don’t smile at babies”.
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